


Keep This From My Children

by Brachylagus_fandom



Series: Good Bones [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Historical References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-08 13:43:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7760035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brachylagus_fandom/pseuds/Brachylagus_fandom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Izumi Curtis has been dying for a very long time, and she isn't dead yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep This From My Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alchemicink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemicink/gifts).



> Title is from Maggie Smith's "Good Bones". It's a good poem. Warning for the general nastiness (not described in detail, but implied heavily) that comes from having a disillusioned character who grew up in pre-Promised Day Amestris.

Izumi had long known that the world was terrible. She grew up in Baschool, where the wind had teeth, the wildlife was nearly unanimously lethal, and the mines poisoned everything within several miles. She had first used alchemy to ensure her food supply was free of heavy metals and her water wouldn't kill her; selling the scrap from those experiences had bought her a train ticket south.

In the South, life was easy. In the South, even the cheapest food could be guaranteed poison-free; more than that, people _paid_ her to do things she had learned to survive. After three months of fixing soil, she sat quietly under a tattooist's needle, the symbol of her specialty coming to life in ink on her skin. More importantly, she had Sig to watch her back; no one had ever done that before. They ended up marrying within a few short months that were among the happiest of her life. Of course, irony declared that it was in Dublith that she made the biggest mistake of her life.

She had been twenty-eight when she drew the array, a decade and a half after the first time she had delicately drawn a circle to make magic happen. She had been careful, so careful this time; their son, with his hair and her eyes, was going to live this time. They would get to raise a child, see them grow and keep them safe. It had been a pipe dream before she took that train ride, and it shouldn't have been a pipe dream anymore. So, when Mother Nature failed, she reached for her chalk.

It was Sig who found her in the basement that night, vomiting blood and reaching for the still-dead corpse of her son. It was Sig who comforted her when the doctor said that most of the organs in her lower abdominal cavity, including her entire reproductive system, were either missing or heavily scarred. It was Sig who said nothing when she laughed in the doctor's face after he told her she was dying. She had been dying since she was six, when the snow in Baschool stopped being anything close to white; she had been dying since she was fourteen, when her mother had died of what the military called a plague but the doctor thought was heavy metal poisoning; she had been dying since she was eighteen, living alone in the wilderness around Briggs. Izumi Curtis had been dying for so long, she barely remembered what being alive felt like.

The key to living while under a terminal diagnosis was to keep moving. Izumi, despite the doctor's warnings, kept going out to the rest of southern Amestris to solve the little problems that no one else would fix. Farmer's fields needed to have nutrients fixed for the planting season, the rain equivalent of a blizzard necessitated emergency reservoirs, and few people had her skill at detecting contaminants in everything from food to the human body. It had been her job for the past twelve years, and she happened to like it; alchemy, especially without an array, gave her a rush that she would never forsake.

Then, out of nowhere, two little boys ran up to her, begging her to teach them alchemy. She told them to get lost, but they were persistent. Eventually, she caved in, half because they were orphans and half because she had always had a soft spot for children.

Ed was the older and louder of the pair, with a (dangerous) goal in mind and a chip in his shoulder to rival hers at his age. Al was soft and quiet most of the time, but his stubbornness could outlast mountains if it needs to. They were her students, her not-quite-children, and it was her job to protect them from the world that would kill them like it tried to kill her if it had the chance.

A few months after she started training the boys, a State Alchemist dropped by the shop. There was a rebellion in Ishval, and they wanted her help to kill the Ishvalans. Ed and Al, who were hiding in the shop's backroom, grinned as she took the Silver Alchemist apart piece by piece without ever clapping her hands together or drawing an array. Of course, they freaked out when she started vomiting blood, but so did Comanche; in the end, she was left in peace again.

Later (much, much later), she will discover that she was among the lucky; the military had been ignoring almost any exemption under the sun in order to kill off the Ishvalans quickly. Among the dead are Sara and Urey Rockbell, Winry's parents, and something about that will set her teeth on edge. Sure, they had been surgeons, but automail surgery is not something you do in the field; the fact that they were pacifists against the war in Ishval (and Creta, and Aerugo, and Drachma…) probably had far more to do with their deaths than their degrees ever did.

About a year after Comanche left in disgrace, Ed and Al went back to Resembool for a few weeks. Considering that the stitches and bad medical alchemy keeping her from dying were currently failing, it initially seemed like very good timing. A few days into their visit, Izumi got an anxious call from Winry. Winry didn't understand even half of what had happened, but she saw enough to get all of Izumi's fine-tuned idiot senses tingling. Izumi attempted to rush to the train station and was reminded why she was on bed rest for at least another week in very short order. By the time she was well enough to make the trip without vomiting blood, she was too late; Ed and Al were gone.

They were her students, and now they had sold their lives to a country Izumi had never believed in and would never trust. They were her students, and it was her job to protect them, but she was not quite fast enough. They were her students, and now they are gone, and she is stuck listening to the news and gossip to determine if they are even alive.

By the time the brothers come back to Resembool, the doctor has declared that Izumi has months to live ten different times; he has always underestimated the strength of her willpower. She is dying, her organs failing, but they have been failing for well over a decade at this point, and Izumi predicts that she has at least another three years left.

Ed and Al are, understandably, nervous when she pulls open her front door. While Al is unrecognizable, Ed has hardly changed at all, still a little under five feet of pure stubbornness. She tries not to laugh at their many failed attempts to convince her that they have not seen the Truth, and finally gets a chance to protect them from their own stupidity. The truth comes out, ugly as it is, and they prepare for war.

It scares her, this country she was born in but has never quite called home. It scared her before she learned the truth and it scares her now. It has been trying to kill her since she was a child, been actually killing her for decades now, and it is time to kill it back.

As the rumors around the Fullmetal Alchemist shift away from Briggs, Izumi dons clothes she has not worn since she was eighteen. She's not exactly sure why she kept the coat she had made, hat she had bartered for, and boots she had stolen, but they are coming in handy now. Briggs is just as bitingly cold and lethal as she had remembered it, and some of the soldiers knew of her even before they started planning.

It is refreshing, to know that she will be remembered long after the battlefield she calls her body has been buried. It is reassuring, to know that Briggs still remembers not only the demon that raided their food supply but the village that she is the last member of. She goes to war with little hope of survival, her body a ticking time bomb, and she thinks she's finally found something - no, someone, two someones - worth dying for.

**Author's Note:**

> This endnote can be skipped entirely, but does offer an explanation for why Izumi's background in this fic is what it is.
> 
> All of the headcanon used in this fic surrounding Izumi's early life comes from a wild extrapolation of a few facts:  
> 1\. Baschool is an abandoned mining town, and the mines look like they could still be viable.  
> 2\. If Youswell is anything to go by, alchemy isn't used in mining, likely because it's too costly to use on a scale large enough for it to matter.  
> 3\. Amestris is tiny and needs to get a lot of metal from somewhere.  
> 4\. Amestris is early to mid-twentieth century, technology-wise. In our world, that era had a lot of industries dumping waste into rivers, with predictably bad results.
> 
> Baschool's pollution is primarily based on two incidents of severe pollution in our world. The poisoned food and water come from Itai-itai disease in Toyama Prefecture, Japan, which happened from roughly 1912 to 1946. Essentially, metal mines upstream were using acid to separate cadmium from zinc, which was needed for Japan's military buildup before WWII. Cadmium happens to be one of the most poisonous elements on the periodic table, and the acid waste was dumped into a river which was used both for drinking water and for irrigating rice paddies. The colored snow is based on Norilsk in Russia, which still ranks as one of the most polluted cities on Earth. Nickel is smelted on-site, and it would (and occasionally still does) snow pink, blue, or black depending on demand. There aren't any trees within a 30-kilometer radius of the smelters and mining the soil is economically viable because of platinum and palladium deposits.
> 
> Both of these cases have a few things in common:  
> 1\. The technology involved was fairly primitive.  
> 2\. The mines involved were for metals (primarily zinc for Toyama and nickel for Norilsk, though various others were also mined in smaller quantities).  
> 3\. The pollution caused by said mines continued for decades.  
> 4\. The governments did little to nothing at all for decades.
> 
> Based off of this and their various actions in canon, the State Military doing nothing while people died of heavy metal poisoning wouldn't be very surprising. It's all completely unsupported in-text, but it seems plausible, and I liked how it related to the narrative.
> 
> Here endeth the explanation. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
